I understand the early hacker mindset came from an era where we wanted to unlock hardware. But in 2023, good unlocked hardware exists and needs more love

What good unlocked hardware exists that is comparable to current apple silicon laptops? (In price, performance, heat, keyboard, trackpad, display quality, battery life, etc.)

The Lenovo Yogas and LG Grams are my favorite in the MacBook class. But if you want more upgradability I recommend the classical Framework 13 and HP elitebooks

Lenovo and LG also have closed hardware that is reverse engineered to run on Linux.

Most of their Linux drivers are contributed by the chipmakers themselves

tell me you've only used Linux since the mid 2010s without telling me you've only used Linux since the mid 2010s

This is very very very recent trend. This wasn't even the case when I was in school. You used to have to use the NDIS wrapper (Windows network driver support in the Linux kernel) for lots and lots of wifi chipsets to get any kind of wifi working.

So what?

The point being that it was vital for the success of Linux that there were hackeres willing to reverse engineer closed hardware to make it run. That there are now official and open source drivers for a lot of hardware is a directly consequence of it.

Exactly

For GPUs AMD yes, but for example when the Asahi project started there was no open source driver from NVIDIA. These trends are very recent, and they do not guarantee anything more anyway (like who knows if they will continue contributing in the next generation).

I wouldn't call either of those in the same class, unless you're specifically referring to the base model MacBook.

The Dell XPS and Razer models are much more similar in build quality, hardware capabilities and price range to the MBPs.

Anecdotally, none. 2021/2022 I received five different Dell and Lenovo notebooks (Lattitude, Precision, ThinkPad, not consumer models) for customer projects to work on and every single one had battery or memory problems OOTB. Battery running times were a joke compared to a MBP, and so were the monitors. Mac notebook monitors aren't matte though, and I find the 14" Alu MBP a bit heavy and bulky. Mind, I was a big fan of my old 2016 XPS but even that had a swollen battery which needed replacement out of warranty.

Of those five notebooks I only kept a Thinkpad x13 gen 2 Ryzen (the last one/only one that wasn't broken) but it's not great either with dysfunctional power management/BIOS under Ubuntu 22.04, something I never had problems with so far on Thinkpads.

Intel/AMD based laptops are no more "unlocked" than apple's (and they are much worse in performance). Documentation is a different thing than "locking/unlocking".